A recurring theme in Nara’s early practice is confrontations with violence. An allegory for one’s ill-fated future, in this painting, a girl with a knife in one hand and a flame ball in the other walks toward a cat as if giving it the option to choose between the two. Red smoke inscribed with “Nothing ever happens, nothing” billows from a ball of fire in the girl’s hand, and the phrase “The needle returns the first of the song and we will sing like before” is scribbled on a blackboard invoking the lyrics of Scottish rock band Del Amitri’s 1989 “Nothing Ever Happens.”

Yoshitomo Nara, Untitled, 2003, Graphite on paper, 16 1⁄2 × 23 5⁄8 in. (42 × 60 cm), Collection of the artist, © Yoshitomo Nara 2003, photo by Heather Rasmussen, courtesy of Pace Gallery and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo
 

In one of his many backpacking trips to Europe in the early 1980s, Nara frequented museums with art historical masterpieces but was also struck by early devotional sculptures, such as the twelfth-century Mother and Child from the Church of Santa Maria de Covet at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. Drawn to the Romanesque style in which accentuated facial features reflect strong devotion, he saw an affinity with Buddhist sculptures, where strength of devotion is proportional to the amount of stylistic deformation and presence.

In Nara’s earliest works made at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, allegories of good and evil collapse, and innocence becomes one with destruction itself. Compositions are divided in half or in quadrants, and figures with elongated heads wear halos, with their hands transforming into flames or knives. In People on the Cloud, a horizon line splits the composition—animals, people, and hybrid figures crawl along the outer edges of the frame. Nara masterfully situates the figures between symbolic and physical planes of the piece.

This exhibition is organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Principal sponsorship is provided by
 

Bill Viola (b. 1951) is a pioneer in developing video as a major art medium. For more than forty years, he has made work that addresses life, death, and the intervening journey and is rooted in both Eastern and Western art and spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism.